While more people are working later in life because of happy things like longer life expectancy, they are also doing so because of very sad things, like a lack of Social Security benefits or retirement plans.
Alissa Quart
In 'Ozark,' the truism that we are not as likely to do as well as our parents did in the past is front and center.
Instead of working to give robots personhood status, we should concentrate on protecting our human workers. If that means developing a more cooperative approach to ownership of autonomous trucks so millions of drivers are not left out in the literal cold, so be it.
Uber is hardly the first company to exploit the financial vulnerability of teachers - and the desperation of public schools more broadly - to score PR points. Amazon, Boeing, Bank of America, and other corporations have played the part of school benefactor, offering everything from reward programs to school supplies.
A lot of the things that bore adults don't bore children, and people forget that. In some ways, boredom is a projection of adults because we can't remember what childhood was like.
If we don't at least try to make the future more equitable, most of us will left with simply scraps.
In an economy where women now make up half the work force, we're going to have to address the treatment of pregnant employees more systemically. The passage of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would better protect against the discrimination pregnant job seekers face.
There's a motherhood penalty because we've been long taught things that are stigmatized about motherhood. As workers, we don't want to talk about our kids at work. We're afraid to, or that when we leave at 5:30 to relieve the sitter we're somehow going to be diminished.
Civic poetry is public poetry. It is political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice. It gives expression not just to our rites but also to our problems and even our values; these poems are not about rustic vacations.
Self-reinvention is an encouraging conceit. It is simply not always a possible one.
There's no better example of how to lead a difficult employee than to have a child. You have another kind of knowledge from your children that's actually applicable outside of childbearing.
Money and one of its embodiments, social class, are both riveting and mysterious to children. And if we don't challenge today's stigma around class status, it will warp a new generation's experience of an even more important class - the kind in which they learn. And that's one thing we simply can't afford.
On the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites' emphasis on words such as 'connection,' 'community,' and 'choice.' Yet despite this democratic vocabulary, money makes a big difference.
Like politics, all status is ultimately local - people compare themselves to those they live near.
Economically anxious, many parents see their children's accomplishments as a sort of insurance against the financial challenges of old age; high-achieving kids, this logic goes, will become high-earning adults and therefore be better able to help Mom and Dad pay for the assisted-living facility in a few decades.
I was just a bright, driven kid.
An IPO-mad technology boom made 'selling out' itself into an honorific.
Motherhood gives you access to a range of different intellectual experiences and ways of seeing the world, which, in a way, makes you more flexible in the workplace. But our employers, our colleagues, don't necessarily understand.
If everybody is a Facebook friend, what is an actual friend?
Brand loyalty starts in the cradle and ends in the grave, as I wrote in my first book, 'Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers.'
When I was doing my research for 'Branded,' I'd meet groups of teenagers and preteenagers or tweens, and they would laugh at a magazine spread in a women's magazine or teen girl magazine and say, 'I'd never buy this outfit. I know these girls are starving themselves.' But they probably would go out and buy the thing eventually.
In a lot of ways, I had a wonderful childhood.
I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the '40s. There was probably cool before that, but that's when people started talking about cool - Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.
Crowdfunding companies like GoFundMe are in themselves not evil. But the fact that we have to rely on them to pay for our basics is.
I used to teach at the Columbia journalism school, and I would tell my students that every book has to have a sentence that motivates it.
Giftedness gives you this amazing tool kit for handling self-discipline and gives you an area of knowledge, but then it also gives you this weird set of aspirations.
When I was a young child, professional aspiration was synonymous to me with the clatter of my mother's high-heeled boots as she went off to teach each 1970s weekday morning, carrying her graded blue books under her arm.
In my 20s, I was a freelance writer with little money and living in a rabbit warren one-and-a-half-bedroom with a roommate.
I love the show 'Billions.' But the main character is basically a hedge fund scumbag, and he's the hero.
The daily deluge of tales of lechery and trauma holds a hidden but crucial truism: sexual harassment routinely feeds on income inequality. After all, it's much harder to exploit an equal.
When I was growing up, my parents thought there could be nothing better than being a writer. And at that time, society afforded that impracticality.
'Middle class' used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new brown Stride Rite Mary Janes with little purple and silver flowers when the old shoes were pinching the toes.
Approximating authenticity online is not such a tall order. In fact, it may be the very least we can do.
The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world.
There are things that neuroscience is useful for in terms of understanding behavior, but there are also things it is not all that useful for, like understanding the nuances of our reactions to poetry.
Like Hipster Racism, Hipster Sexism is a distancing gesture, a belief that, simply by applying quotations, uncool, questionable, and even offensive material about women can be alchemically transformed.
Sometimes I think that the public's lack of criticism of the rich - and how they seek their pleasure - might derive from the fact that Americans still believe they will one day be joining their number.
When I got pregnant with my daughter, both my husband and I were freelancers, and we didn't have that much security. We had savings. We were better off than many people, but we didn't have, you know, pensions and all the things that people used to have.
Teaching has always been a poorly paid profession, particularly considering its educational requirements and responsibilities.
At the end of the day, the truth is that if - when - robots prevail, so many vocations will actually become close to impossible. Save for the profession of making robots, that is.
The middle class is a group defined by more than just money: it also leans on credentials, education, aspirations, assets, and, of course, household income.
For the rich and powerful, pregnancy might not be an obstacle - it might even help one's career. But for the rest of us, it remains a hindrance.
There are actually very few deeply 'gifted' kids with transcendent cognitive or artistic abilities.
Neurohumanities offers a way to tap the popular enthusiasm for science and, in part, gin up more funding for humanities.
Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up in its place, what I have called America's dystopian social net. That is, we now require private solutions to what are public problems.
Parents who press their children to succeed do so in hopes of preparing them for an adulthood of high achievement.
Hipster Sexism consists of the objectification of women but in a manner that uses mockery, quotation marks, and paradox: the stuff you learned about in literature class. As funny as Dunham's 'Girls' is, it can definitely border on Hipster Sexism.
If we could support school curricula about social class, we might discuss the full complexity of 'wealth' within the parameters of our children's educational lives. Out of these lesson plans, we might talk more about what society values - and whether it rewards the right things.
Although federal law prohibits companies with 15 or more employees from discriminating against pregnant job seekers, it can be quite hard for an ordinary woman to land a job if she lets prospective bosses know she is pregnant.
Kids don't come cheap.
